Imagine someone saying this in a sad voice: “I can’t believe you just did that.” Now, imagine it said with lots of snark. Tone of voice can significantly change the meaning of a sentence – and according to recent research, that meaning can be difficult for teens to decode.
It’s the opposite of what Michelle Morningstar, BA’11, PhD’17, a former McGill doctoral student in clinical psychology, expected to find when she set out to evaluate how well teens understand the emotional cues encoded in voices. While previous work showed that young adults had trouble understanding a speaker’s mood, those studies had been done with subjects parsing recordings of adult voices.
Morningstar figured that teens should be more adept at decoding the mood of people their own age. After all, 14-year-olds spend a lot of time hanging around other 14-year-olds – and caring a great deal about their opinions. The research involved both teen and adult actors reading a sample of sentences with different intonations.
About halfway through the experiment, Morningstar realized she wasn’t finding the trend she’d expected. “It turns out that teenagers’ tones of voice were difficult to understand for everybody,” she says. “The teens had a double whammy.” Adults had a hard time understanding teens. And teens had an even harder time understanding fellow teens.
Now, Morningstar is exploring the mechanics behind the issue by observing the activity in subjects’ brains via MRI scans as they try to parse the emotions behind a statement.
In the meantime, how should one communicate with adolescents without misinterpretation, whether you’re older or a peer? Morningstar’s advice is simple: be direct and take the extra time to explain how you feel.
